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Choose Privacy Week 2018

Choose Privacy Week is an initiative from the American Library Association that promotes the importance of individual privacy rights. It’s a time to engage each other in conversation about “big data” and ensure that your private information is protected. Due to the recent revelations regarding Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, and with data breaches becoming more prevalent, this topic is becoming increasingly more important.

Your library is here to help. Take a look at one of these books to learn about how your personal data can be stored, tracked, and utilized, and how you can protect yourself:

Data and Goliath by Bruce Schneier – Reveals the unsettling ways in which corporations and governments track and monitor everyday activities, profiling the technological, legal, and social solutions available for enabling better privacy and avoiding cybercrime.

The Aisles Have Eyes by Joseph Turow – Shows readers how merchants use data-mining to track shoppers and predictive analytics to change the way consumers buy, invade privacy, and define shopping reputations.

Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz – A former Google data scientist presents an insider’s look at what the vast, instantly available amounts of information from the Internet can reveal about human civilization and society.

Privacy in the Age of Big Data by Theresa Payton – Discusses the benefits of digital surveillance and data collection as well as the dangers associated with collection activities, and identifies the best protection measures against new technologies and surveillance measures.

Dragnet Nation by Julia Angwin – An investigative journalist offers a revealing look at the surveillance economy in America that captures citizens’ actions online and off, putting individual freedoms at risk, and discusses results from a number of experiments she conducted to try and protect herself.